Recently, John Kerry traveled to Shanghai to talk climate change with Chinese counterparts. Afterward, a joint communique committed to fight climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.” On Earth Day, President Biden opened a virtual world summit on climate with an announcement that the U.S. would halve our emissions by 2030.
Recall that, upon his inauguration, Biden issued a flurry of executive orders related to climate change, including one designating climate change a national security threat, one rejoining the Paris Accord, another halting the Keystone XL pipeline and yet another freezing petroleum leases and permits on federal land for 60 days. Lots of drama and aspiration.
What’s reality? The primary security threat by Biden’s new climate-change name looks the same as the leading national security threat in traditional terms: China. The totalitarian Communist dictatorship is responsible for 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EDGAR database.
China’s emissions are not only the world’s most, but they are increasing every year. U.S. emissions are less than half as much and have been decreasing for over a decade. Half again lower is India, whose emissions account for about 7 percent.
The administration should confront China on climate change and raise an international outcry about its renegade behavior, not send John Kerry to make nice with China, whose vice minister stated the real position: “Some countries are asking China to do more on climate change. I’m afraid that is not very realistic.”
At home and overseas, China continues to build noxious coal-fueled power plants. Meanwhile, fracking in the U.S. has generated increased supplies of natural gas, enabling the replacement of coal with natural gas plants which emit half the GHGs.
The Paris Accord serves as a fig leaf for China, allowing it to posture as climate-conscious, while doing the opposite. In 2015, China submitted a Nationally Determined Commitment under the Paris Accord that made a mockery of the accord. It committed to stop increasing its GHG emissions by 2030. In other words, China committed to worsen global climate conditions for 15 years — with a decade now remaining.
By rejoining the Paris Accord without confronting China, the administration endorses this farce.
Restricting fracking endorses farce, as well. Fracking has been, and continues to be, the most powerful driver of our declining emissions. Happily, Biden’s 60-day ban on leases on federal lands expired on March 21 and has not been renewed.
A positive here in Connecticut is the natural gas power plant project in Killingly that seems to be proceeding. The Killingly plant stands to do more to stop climate change than Gov. Ned Lamont’s proposal for an artfully named new gas tax, the Transportation Climate Initiative.
In addition to reducing emissions, fracking and natural gas have made the U.S. energy-independent with big foreign policy benefits.
The benefits could go much further. If natural gas can replace coal plants here in the U.S., it can do so abroad. The U.S. is beginning to export oil and gas (which Keystone XL would have facilitated). We could export on a preferential basis to India, which is now building coal plants. Using petroleum, this key ally could pursue economic development without following China’s disastrous path of massive GHG emissions.
In the purely economic sphere, hasty abandonment of all fossil fuels has significant costs. China illustrates this point in the opposite case: China is continuing — and increasing — its use of cheap coal, precisely because of the economic benefits of low-cost energy.
Why does the world community overlook China’s disastrous behavior?
Simple. China and its apologists construe climate change on a per-capita basis, saying China’s emissions are half of U.S. emissions because China has four times the population.
The fallacy here is obvious: Mother Earth does not care how many people damage the environment. For example, does it matter whether one person gives you a lethal dose of arsenic or four people each give you one-quarter of the lethal dose? You still die, right?
Apologists for the Chinese assert further that China is a developing nation, with half the per-capita income as the U.S., so it would be “inequitable” to stifle China’s economic growth with emissions restrictions.
The fallacy here is just as obvious: Mother Earth does not care about “equity.”
Now at this fifth anniversary of the Paris Accord, revised NDCs are due. Only eight have been submitted, not including China’s.
If Biden is serious about climate change and national security, he should call upon all nations to submit revised NDCs committed to immediate and continuing reductions in GHG emissions, with no exceptions and no excuses. Second, enforcement provisions should be added to the accord, committing all signatories to collective action against violators.
These provisions would add meaning and teeth to the accord, which is now just diplomatic talky-talk. Then, the accord might actually save the world from climate change, while, at the same time, serve as a soft power instrument to save the world from the traditional national security threat posed by an increasingly militaristic totalitarian Chinese Communist regime.
Red Jahncke is the president of Townsend Group Intl, LLC, a Greenwich-based consulting firm. A version of this column appeared originally in Washington Examiner.
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May 10, 2021 at 11:06AM
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